Cheaters and Liars – How to Spot Them

by Sarah on March 24, 2010

It seems too many people I know are dealing with cheats recently. Is it that writing this blog that I notice more, or is it happening more often? It is such a shame to see wonderful women going through such extreme breakups. The good news is that each one of them, even just after 3 months, are blossoming away from their exes. It is possible to get through these breakups – and come out on top.

Listening to stories of lies and excuses, it made me wonder if there is a way to spot a liar. So many of these guys lie outright to their girlfriends – although normally they are not the lying kind. It takes them to finally breakup, come clean or the girlfriend to add up the clues for the lies to surface.

I took a look at an interesting book The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships to see if there are warning signs we should look for in our partners. Author Dr Robert Feldman has spent over 25 years researching lying and deception and says that we are unlikely to be able to tell if he is lying to us.

In a study of tens of thousands of people, leading researchers in deception Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo found that people can pick whether someone is lying or not only 47% of the time – we actually are a bit worse at picking someone lying than if we guessed randomly. And in this study they knew they were looking for liars – not much hope for us when we expect someone to tell the truth.

So what about signs like averting your gaze? Isn’t that meant to show someone is lying? Actually no, there are no general physical signals that someone is lying – experts instead found great individual differences in how people lie. And seasoned liars (like a frequent cheater) learn what their own giveaway signs are that they are lying and train themselves to not do them!

We have an unconscious bias to believe people (imagine how exhausting it would be if we distrusted everyone we came in contact with), even when we have reason to believe the other person has a reason to trick you.

So that doesn’t give us much help in recognizing a cheater through their lying. Perhaps it is better to look out for the other signs that he might be cheating rather than relying on our skill at picking the lies from the truths.

Hi Sarah! So strange that you stopped by my corner of the web because I was JUST THINKING ABOUT YOU earlier. So we’re in sync

You have been so prolific with your writing lately! Good for you, girl.

And I love these kinds of topics. I’m really not sure that there is a science to detecting a cheater, because as you say, the good ones have perfected the art of lying. This is of course not in the least bit reassuring, but it does set the wheels in motion. I’m sorry that so many of your friends have experienced this lately. It’s so difficult to regain that trust with someone else when we are forced to deal with this ourselves. But better they learn the hard way early on than to stay with someone for years without this knowledge.